Kurt and Rebecca

From the Commitment Reading of the Pueblo Indian and a slam poem by Michael Cirelli
(arranged for Kurt and Rebecca’s wedding, July 27, 2008.)

Before we met, you and I were halves un-joined except in the wide river of our minds, where each other's distant shore, the opposite wings of a bird, the other half of a seashell, curled and stripped to fine perfection. We did not know each other then, did not know our determination to keep alive the cry of one riverbank to the other. We were apart, yet together in ignorance of one another, like two apples falling from a common tree. I knew you existed as a memory, long before you understood my desire to join my freedom to yours and yours to mine. I will remember.

Our paths collided long enough for our indecision to be swallowed up by a greater need of love. When you came to me, the sun surged towards the earth and the moon escaped from the darkness to bless the union of our two spirits, so alike that the creator designed them for life's endless dance, a circle K and R, spinning in the middle and where they join is us, because I am your Parker painter, your supplier of, and you, you are my beloved partner, keeper of my heart's odd secrets, clothed in summer blossoms so the icy hand of winter never touches us. I thank your patience. And trust our joining is like a tree to earth, a cloud to sky and even more, for richer or poor, in sickness and in health, we are the reason the world can laugh on its battlefields and rise from the ashes of its selfishness to hear me say, in this time, in this place, in this way - I loved you best of all.

From the first moment that our eyes set on each other like the dust, our hearts melted like wax that turned to vinyl and the albums turned, degrees upon degrees upon degrees. Our chests opened up like the sky playing the music of a land of showers translated into living for bread, mind became tongues as the summer melted like butter and leaves slowly roasted on trees.

Somehow we had remembered that we used to love each other, but couldn't recall where or when or why. Our hearts were like wax, and the vinyl rotated like it had never turned before till our souls spun around the sun and you became my earth. That's when we first met.

Then I walked the streets of Japan for thirty days, six hours, five-and-a-quarter minutes, it seemed like a year with new eyes swinging low trying to pick up rhymes for you on concrete and neon bustle that reminded me of you until we met again. You said, "yes," and then we found ourselves outside under a ripe moon, our candle constructed of the excess wax from my heart, exchanging wine and optimisms, but the album turned degrees, upon degrees of romanticism, I said "I guess I'll see you next lifetime," which was ironic because my lifeline was entwined with another, I used to love her, until I met you.

So I jumped in your car with P-town plates to go skiing on mountains with the thrust of plate-tectonics, and with you. Through bumps and trees, we followed each other up and down until the snow settled on our hoods. We packed lunches of bread and cheese and drank the breeze blowing off the slopes of Mt. Hood. And there was no need for a car radio, because my heart spun the wax which was the vinyl which turned those degrees times three, and this time I thought to myself, "love me, love me, say that you love me."

We made our love ceramic. It was so fragile that our heads began to spin like clay on a wheel, scriptures flipped, pieces chipped, words fell off as the album turned, throwing degrees upon themselves like neither one of us wanted to be the first to say goodbye, so we said I do. And by degrees our does become deeds where we will sign our names with greed with the excess wax from our melted hearts now tripped and tied in a frieze, and all we need is one witness, as we sign our intentions to become anew. Will you say I do?

So we can return to the same Dalles that we said "I love you" in for forty days and thirty-nine nights and it will be fire, and we’ll melt our albums back into a new heart, forget where they came from, return our records, so they can play a new composition, like a beat.

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